Author Comments

It is the beginning of the universe, and it's a tough place to live. War rages on between matter and anti-matter as these two equal but opposite forces fight for dominance in the universe.

You play as a quark trying to survive within this turbulent world.

In creating this game, I utilised some fairly simple physics of electromagnetic force to create interactions between particles. When the particles collide, the effects are all valid interactions.

There are, however, some inconsistencies:

1. Today, quarks are never found on their own in the universe and thus never interact in this way. Whether they did interact this way before protons and neutrons were formed (ie. right at the start of the universe) is open to debate (as far as I know).
2. There are no strong, weak or gravitational forces used in the game. However, we currently don't know the exact configurations of the forces at the start of the universe, so I'm not going to lose sleep over that one.
3. There are probably other interactions that I missed. Whoops.

In any case, I hope this is a fun game to play. Please leave some comments if you notice any issues and I'll do what I can to fix them (or at least I won't make the same mistake for my next game...).

Reviews

Rated 5 / 5 stars2010-11-27 22:17:11

Pions Gone Digital

This game, I love. I am a huge fan of particle physics, and after so much time searching, this is one of the few games I have managed to find that accurately captures a nuclear reaction (besides nuclear fission). The idea of playing in the realm of quarks in the universe is amazing.

There are a few things this game lacks: the heavier quarks (charm, strange, top, and bottom), and the leptons (electron, muon, tau, their neutrinoes). But, I did overall find this to be a very enjoyable game.

I have a few strategy tips I would like to share:
*The down quark tends to be a better choice than an up quark. The down quark has half the electrical charge of an up quark, so you will be less likely to attract your antimatter partner. Although you start as an up quark, try to bounce into an antidown quark ASAP.
*Try, if possible, to avoid the photons that are emitted from an annihilation. If you collide with a photon, you can get pushed back into something you really don't wait to touch, e.g. your antimatter partner.

I'd also like to reply to the author's reported inconsistencies, in the order they appear.

1. In the early universe, particles were too energetic to form any hadrons. This was during the "quark-gluon plasma" epoch of the universe.
2. Like I said above, hadrons could not form, so the strong nuclear force could not act. Gravity is, at the scale of the quark, practically non-existent. You also technically did involve the weak nuclear force, when, for instance, an up and antidown collide (or a down and antiup), the two swap flavor. The weak force allows these flavors to be swapped.
3. Only one you really missed: technically, as time went on, the amount of antimatter should have decreased, not increased. Although this one doesn't really matter, as having the game get easier over time would not be very enjoyable on the player's part. Oh, and when a neutral pion (containing an up-antiup or down-antidown pair) decays into two photons, the photons can sometimes decay into an electron-positron pair.

I personally feel that a much larger sequel (featuring the full Standard Model) could possibly be made, with the right effort.

A few things I'd like to see in the second version:

*All six quarks, all six leptons featured (instead of just up and down quarks).
*In time, you can form hadrons (delta baryons, nucleons, pions, rho, eta, and chi mesons) which can benefit you inside. In time, you can combine nucleons to form simple nuclei.
*If possible to integrate while still maintaining accuracy, provide a sort of "goal", or at least a set of achievements (e.g. surviving X amount of time, decaying into a lighter particle, forming your first baryon).
*Maybe a multiplayer mode.

Rated 3 / 5 stars2010-04-06 22:11:25

Interesting game

~~REVIEW~~
Now this was an interesting game, up untill a point ofcourse, it kinda gets stale after abit, the idea of this game is pretty interesting and the fun factor is there for about 5 min then i start wanting abit more to this, the effects were notbad but im thinking it still needs more, maybe when the "GLOBES" hit eachother there should be a big "BLAST" effect instead of a small little one, and also this game might benifit abit better with some sorta mini game? say like the globe hits 3 other globes at once it will bring up a mini game screen where you have to do something extra to win more points, anyways just an idea or two for you to spice up the game abit

~~THINGS TO IMPROVE ON~~
The game needs some nifty features to keep the users entertained as explained above a mini game of some sort might help that

Rated 0.5 / 5 stars2010-04-05 21:45:51

Rated 3.5 / 5 stars2010-04-05 21:10:12

Not particularly bad

Nice work, quite creative.
Overall presentation is decent, I would have preferred a white or brighter background or colour pallet.
I love the expolsion sound, sounds just like the half life 2 thumper thing.